Divine Images
by Snarks
Summary: "He only has to return to Dean, he knows, only has to make that far and he will be safe. He'll be home." A series of drabbles In which Cas makes a friend during his somewhat tremulous tattoo session and, as a result, has at least the chance of a place to turn when he is turned out from the bunker. Destiel (eventually). Rating will eventually change.
1. Chapter 1

_**Then every man, of every clime,**_

_**That prays in his distress,**_

_**Prays to the human form divine,**_

_**Love, Mercy, Pity, Peace.**_

**"The Divine Image" - William Blake**

* * *

The world is overwhelming as a human.

Sights and smells and hot and cold and hunger as deep as the see with no end in sight. Everything that had once been muted and faraway, tucked behind the thick shield of his grace, is there now, powerful and impossible to ignore. His feet ache from walking, his muscles sore from the work he has done to earn the scant money he has – and such a strange thing, to be in need of money to get the things he requires. There are blisters on his feet from his shoes and the sharp sting of a sunburn flaring up the back of his neck and over his face, splinters and dirt ground into his hands, beneath his torn and uneven fingernails. The scruff on his face itches from the unchecked growth, he's tired – so tired – and the wound on his arm flares with pain whenever he dares move it too much.

He's hungry.

That, by far, is the worst thing about being human. The gnawing ache of hunger deep in his stomach, the roar of an organ left empty devouring whatever it can get ahold of. When he first became human it would subside for a time, fade away to an irritation he was dully aware of at the back of his mind, but his body could only go so long without protesting. He is dizzy more often than not, the hot sun above not helping his body's struggle to continue on without nourishment, and a headache has been ragging behind his eyes for days. The scraps he snatches here and there help some, but they are not enough on their own.

The shelter was the best. A cot to sleep on at night when the strangeness of sleep made its demands on his exhausted body, a place to shower the dirt and filth away for a little while and two meals a day, small but nourishing, enough to keep him upright and keep him moving. He had felt something archaic and instinctive resist when it became clear he had to move on, some blood born human trait calling at him to stay where there was comfort and warmth and food. It had been unsettling; the overwhelming sense of humanity that washed over him greater than it had been since Metatron had stolen his grace. He forced himself to move on though, plow onward towards Kansas, towards safety, towards Dean.

Dean is really the only thing keeping him pushing on. Past the hunger and exhaustion, past the very human want to stay in the few places that provide even the smallest promise of comfort. He has done everything for Dean, good and bad, what are a few hundred more miles and an empty stomach to contend with? It's because of Dean that he is standing where he is, hovering before a small, hole in the wall tattoo parlor with all his worldly wealth cradled in his hand. There is a seeming endless line of vendors stretching on beside him, tempting and tormenting with the drifting, mingling aroma of cooking food. A woman turns sausages expertly on a small grill just to his left, popping grease and onions and peppers sizzling nearby, soft rolls sopping all the dripping goodness up as she makes her goods and hands them off to the hungry passersby.

He has been hording every penny of the money he earns and finds since he realized an assumed name and constant movement would not be enough to remain hidden from his furious siblings. He found a small stained and wrinkled piece of paper pinned to a post at a bus stop some blocks back and he felt some small spark of hope at the promise of 10% off his first tattoo at the shop it was advertising for. He doesn't know how much it costs to stain his skin with ink, but he's confident that what he has should be enough. He wants only for a small thing, a warding spell that will keep him from him hidden from his brothers and sisters. Just enough to stay safe long enough to get to Kansas, to get to Dean.

The parlor is not as clean or maintained as those he has seen in the past, "Stains" is the name that he reads over the door and he thinks it a painfully accurate description of the place. Just inside though, he can see a woman diligently at work on a young man before the window, her blonde hair short save for where she has pulled the locks up into an approximation to what Dean once called a "Mohawk" and her dark eyes focused on the needle she is guiding into the young man's skin. He has lost his ability to see souls with his grace, but he thinks as he looks at the artist that he must have retained at least some small ability to read people. He knows that she is the one he wants to embed the spell into his skin.

He pockets his money, careful not to lose the worn voucher, and enters the shop. His stomach twists in his gut, painfully demanding food Castiel cannot grant it for a long time yet. He only has to return to Dean, he knows, only has to make that far and he will be safe.

He'll be home.


	2. Chapter 2

She knows he's a soldier the moment she looks up from the tribal band she's tattooing into the frat boy sitting in her chair - the third she's done that day, the eighth that week. Frats don't wander far from what they know, no matter how much her artist's soul wishes they would.

He has the look of a soldier, a familiar countenance she remembers well from her childhood in her grandfather's shop. The men back then all looked something of the same to her child's eyes. Ragged and tired, worn down to the nub by the war they were fighting or back from fighting. Back in body but not quite in mind, she remembered how they looked out at the world with eyes turned to the past, to the horrors they faced and the actions they had been forced to take. Her brothers look like that too, sometimes, when she gets to see them when they're not on tour. It's the curse of her family, to be loyal to the nation they were born to, to sign up to fight and die for it if it comes to that. Her grandfather first, then her father and uncles and now her brothers. All haunted gazes and memories they don't speak of but a deep felt pride for what they had done. The man standing before her now - tall and lean beneath the baggy clothes he wore, dark hair mussed by the wind and eye so blue they hurt a little to look at for too long - looks much the same. Though she doesn't see much of the pride in him she used to catch in her grandfather's smile.

"I would like to get a tattoo please." His voice is low and graveled, like whiskey and the rumble of an engine and she finds it surprisingly suits his lank frame. He pulls his hand from his pocket as she turns her full attention on him, holding out a crumpled mess of bills and a promotional voucher for ten percent off Hank had spread around a few months back. She glances at it but knows already that it is well passed expired, though that doesn't really matter to her either. Hank's bitch-fit be damned she's going to honor the pale yellow paper anyway. You don't ask more from those who have already given so much.

Instead she nods at the coupon, glancing up to him and - ignoring the brat in her chair not so subtly whining for her attention, convinced she is utterly enchanted by his talk of stupid frat parties and college level douche-baggary - nods with a smile. "Sure thing, what were you thinking of?"

Already she imagines battalion names and platoon marks, the names of ships the man had served on if he was navy or maybe even the full Army Rangers Badge - she gave her oldest brother one the day he graduated Ranger School. When Blue Eyes instead pulls up his shirt and shows the expanse of flat stomach to motion to a place just above his left hip and says, "I would like some lines of text here, please. Not much. I have it written down..." She's mildly surprised but not by much.

Tattoos are meant to be special things, pieces of a life stained into the skin. Sometimes for the world to see, sometimes only for the person getting the ink. There are more than a few - the few dozen drunks and partiers, the frats and sororities - who get the same half dozen tattoos for no good reason at all, but she doesn't like to think of them. Her grandfather had started his trade in the army and had gone on to open up a shop believing that tattoos were a spiritual thing, mental scars made visible, triumphs painted in permanently ink, loyalty stained into the flesh and heartbreak honored in the blood shed in the act of the inking. She had grown up with those same ideals and, even in the shitty hole in the wall she is working in now she tried to still live by that code. A few lines of text were all Blue Eyes asked for, was all he needed. She could give that to him.

She smiles to the soldier man and motions to the worn second hand leather chair Rob had stuck against the wall across from the door. She could hand him off to Dave or Joey, they're both in the alley out back smoking while they wait for the night rush to pick up. "No problem, give me about twenty minutes to finish up here and I'll be right with you."

Blue Eyes nods but doesn't smile, his gaze drifting to the things haunting his head, things far from her and the crappy second rate shop she works in. He turns and goes to the couch, motions stiff and mechanical with the subtle certainty of a soldier's gate. He leans as he walks, not drunkenly - he's more sober than half the other artists in the place tattooing as she sat there - but in the slightly awkward manner that made her think of her father after he had been shot in the back. It's an old injury that subtly weakens Blue Eyes' steps, a war wound.

Perhaps the only visible one on him.


	3. Chapter 3

**All my love and devotion to Casismyfavorite for being so lovely and kind as to review! It meant so much to hear what you thought of my mad little project :)**

**I love and adore everyone who is so kind as to read this, and I absolutely worship reviews and concrit 3**

**- Snarks**

* * *

As she promised, it isn't long before the woman has the boy she had been inking bandaged and ushered off to the back counter to pay.

The boy looks disgruntled by her brush off but doesn't seemed bothered otherwise as he pulls his wallet from his back pocket and counts out the bills to pay for the artwork on his arm. The artist herself has already turned her attention to her station, wiping it down and cleaning it with the sort of ritual obsessiveness born of a long ago forged habit. Her movements are sure and practiced; a kind of dance he's only really seen in Sam and Dean during hunts. The reflection of a lifetime of learning and experience put out on display, the same she showed while finishing up the tattoo on the boy. If he had any uncertainty about wanting her to ink the spell into his skin, it's gone now. She is an old hand at her trade, despite her youth, an artist and a master in a way the few others he sees in the shop are not. Whatever he asks her to stain into his skin will be perfect and precise. He feels a warm surge of comfort for that fact, the first he's known since his grace was taken from him. He can't afford the spell to be wrong; he won't survive the wrath of his siblings if it is.

A moment later and the woman is standing before him, dark jeans tattered and a worn, clearly beloved t-shirt - advertising the campaign of a band called "The Ramones" - baggily hanging on her frame. She's built sturdily; square shoulders and shallow curves that would make her look wane if not for the lines of her muscles showing off her strength. She looks somewhat boyish, really, especially with the proud set of her wide chin and the square shape of her face. She moves with an ease indicative of those comfortable with their bodies, though, and he thinks that her frame suits the strength in her eyes beautifully. Her stark blonde hair is styled much taller than he realized, stubbornly defying the pull of gravity in a way he envies as it proudly crowns the soft olive of her complexion of her skin. She smiles when she realizes that his gaze has traveled to her hair, the deep red she has painted her lips making her dark eyes seem even warmer as she makes a teasing point of looking him over in return.

He wonders what it is she sees when she looks at him. What the world at large thinks of his stilted attempts at humanity. If he looks as new to mortality as he feels, if the woman before him can sense the wrongness in his being, the strangeness of his existence. If she is bothered by the stench of his poorly washed clothes - he scrubbed them as best he could in a ramshackle bus terminal with pearly white hand soap, put them back on still a bit damp and uncomfortable when the looks he received from the other men started to warn of a forcible eviction from the rotund security guard he had glimpsed when he had snuck in - or by the days old stubble on his face, the grease in his hair, the pitiful humanity that clings to him. He as an angel, once, and this woman - this stranger - will never know, and never guess at the fact. The Fall never really stops, not even when you hit the ground. There's always so much further to go.

She holds out her hand, dry and a bit chapped from the residue of the bright blue gloves she wears while working and he takes it after only a brief moment's pause - he's getting better at the strange dance that is human interaction, but his stiffness is a constant reminder of his limitations. When she speaks her voice is young and steady but the tones are edged with cigarette smoke and hard liquor. It reminds him of Ellen Harvelle, dearly missed friend that she is, and it is both comforting and painful in a way that the loss never could be when he was so securely wrapped in his numbing grace. "Lana Winters at your service." She has an open, easiness to her tones as she meets his gaze but beneath it he can read the sharp appraisal of her look. "You ready for this?"

He nods, mechanical and robotic and doubts the truth of his affirmation. Is he ready? No, probably not. The Falling never really stops, not even when you hit the ground. There's always so much further to go, when you're human.


End file.
